


Castle Flippers

by inkpot (myexplodingcat)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, Hogwarts Founders - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24111916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myexplodingcat/pseuds/inkpot
Summary: It's been twenty years since Dumbledore School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was destroyed in the war, and no one has been able to find it since--until these four friends showed up. Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin are working together, trying to clean up the castle and turn it back into a school--but honestly, no one should entrust their children to these idiots.This is a fluffy, sitcom-like AU in which Gryf fights stuff, Rowena does things "for science," Helga tries to keep her cookie stash under wraps, and Sal absolutely cannot talk to women. We learn why Ravenclaw's symbol is an eagle and why you really shouldn't piss off Helga Hufflepuff. At one point they set some acromantula on fire. Oh, and the school basilisk is still a thing, but in a cute way.
Relationships: Helga Hufflepuff/Salazar Slytherin
Comments: 3
Kudos: 27





	1. We found it! Let's break in!

“That’s a lot of rubble,” Ravenclaw said, getting out of the driver’s side of the beat-up van to join her friends, all peering at the distant structure through the fog. “Are we sure this castle is worth it?”

“We found it, though!” Gryffindor beamed at them, jumping up and down a little. “We actually found it. Dumbledore School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Come on! I heard it’s still booby-trapped after the war.”

“That’s a selling point?” Slytherin asked.

“It’s been over twenty years,” Ravenclaw pointed out. “Seems a bit of a stretch to think they’d still be active. Besides, did you have anywhere else to be?”

“Starbucks,” Slytherin grumbled. “It’s still 8AM.”

“Hehe, what happened to hating muggle stuff?” Hufflepuff teased, poking him. “Caramel macchiatos are part of muggle technology, you know!”

“Don’t remind me. I can’t believe we didn’t come up with them first.”

Gryffindor turned around, his mouth open. “Really, dude? Since when do you drink fancy coffee?”

“Since I introduced him to it three years ago,” Hufflepuff said, beaming. “He’s been avoiding mentioning it in your presence ever since.”

Ravenclaw buried her face in her hands, shaking from laughter.

Slytherin scowled at them. “I hate all of you.”

“No, you don’t,” Hufflepuff said.

“Okay, not you, Helga. I hate all of the rest of you.”

“No, you don’t!”

“Hey,” Gryffindor said, pointing back at the castle with both hands. “We’ve been here five whole minutes and we aren’t exploring.”

“Fair enough,” Ravenclaw said. “Get back in the van, let’s drive closer.”

“We could use our brooms,” Slytherin complained.

“Brooms do not have cushy bouncy seats,” Gryffindor pointed out. “Besides, it’s windy, and all our stuff is in the trunk.”

Grumbling, Slytherin followed them.

As they drove closer, they discovered the full extent of the wreckage. They started finding bits of rubble and the castle’s stones as far away as two miles out.

“Did there used to be a wall here?” Hufflepuff asked.

“Hard to tell,” Ravenclaw answered.

“Ow. Did you feel that?” Slytherin asked, wincing.

“What? Hang on—owwww.” Gryffindor rubbed at his temples. “Yeah, I get what you mean.”

“A disturbance in the Force,” Ravenclaw muttered.

“Broken protective spells, I bet,” Hufflepuff said. “The castle was destroyed, so they shattered too and now they’re all over the place. There’s going to be a lot of cleanup to do.”

“Do you think they’ll restore themselves if we fix the castle?” Gryffindor asked.

All of them looked at Ravenclaw. “I don’t think so,” she said after a pause. “We’re inevitably going to put everything back differently, and I think that’s going to mess it up. We probably have to clear off the old spells first if we don’t want trouble. And of course we’ll need to set up our own after—wait—shit,” she said. “I can’t look, I’m driving. Was that a body?”

“Um… mostly,” Hufflepuff said, turning back around in her seat, face pale. “I think we’re going to see a lot of those.”

“Some kind of memorial,” Slytherin said, as they passed another few suspiciously shaped lumps of moss. “We need to design one. Maybe some sort of mausoleum… we know the names of the dead, don’t we?”

“Yeah, I have a book,” Ravenclaw said.

“Way to scare the crap out of our future students, Sal,” Gryffindor said, his hands behind his head. “Here’s the bodies of all the people who died here! Well, what we could find of them, anyway.”

“It’s not like they won’t know already,” Slytherin said. “Unless they’re allergic to history books.”

“Hashtag me,” Gryffindor said.

Hufflepuff winced. “Gryf, your muggle slang needs an update. No one says ‘hashtag’ out loud any more.”

“This is getting harder to drive through,” Ravenclaw said. “All this overgrown wilderness. Do you think this forest was always this big?”

“No,” Slytherin answered. “See over there? If I’m remembering my father correctly, that’s the old Quidditch pitch.”

“Aw, no!” Gryffindor said, leaning across the van and almost landing in Slytherin’s lap. “We gotta fix that asap. All the goal hoops are busted.”

“Hold it,” Slytherin said. “Rowena, stop the van. Everyone keep your eyes shut.”

“What’s the problem?” Hufflepuff asked.

“Basilisk. Just a little guy, though, must be a juvenile. Probably come out of the forest. I’ll go talk to it.” He unbuckled his seatbelt.

“I could just run it over,” Ravenclaw offered.

“No!” Slytherin opened his door quickly and got out.

There was a long pause while everyone else waited, eyes still shut, for Slytherin to come back.

“I’m picking my nose,” Gryffindor said. “But none of you can see it.”

“Thanks for the information,” Ravenclaw said.

“Haha, you can’t tell if I’m really doing it or not.”

“That’s okay,” Hufflepuff said. “We trust you.”

They heard the van door open again. “Okay, you can look.”

What they saw was Slytherin with a snake coiled around his neck like a fancy scarf. Everyone else jumped.

“It isn’t a basilisk?” Gryffindor asked.

“It is,” Slytherin said, “but something’s poked the poor thing’s eyes out. A bird or something, see the shape of the scars?”

“Do I need to point out that if that thing bites you, you’re dead?” Ravenclaw asked.

“Aww, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?” Slytherin said, gently booping the basilisk’s nose with a finger. It flicked its tongue in response.

“Sal, you cannot keep a basilisk as a pet,” Ravenclaw said, aghast—completely ignoring Hufflepuff, who was waving her hands frantically in an unmistakable “don’t say it!” gesture.

Gryffindor groaned. “Now you’ve done it.”

“I can’t, huh?” Slytherin grinned at them. “We’ll see. Bazzie, when we rebuild the castle, you can have your own room. How about that?”

Hufflepuff smacked her best friend lightly on the shoulder. “Rowena, just… don’t say anything else. Let’s keep going.”

“If he gets a snake room, my library’s gonna be at least three floors tall,” Ravenclaw muttered, starting the van again.

“I never thought I’d hear what baby-talk sounds like in Parseltongue,” Gryffindor said.

“With balconies,” Ravenclaw was still saying under her breath. “Big, airy balconies. With, with arches… and blue hangings… and trailing plants…”

“Oh, plants!” Hufflepuff said enthusiastically. “It’ll be so nice to get the greenhouses fixed up.”

“I imagine that’ll be difficult,” Slytherin said, pausing mid-snake dialogue. The basilisk sat up straighter and flicked its tongue again, as if annoyed that Slytherin’s attention was diverted. “A collection of dangerous plants, all gone wild? That’s going to take more than just a reparo.”

“I don’t know,” Hufflepuff said sadly. “I think a lot of the old specimens will have been lost without anyone caring for them. I saw a list of the plants they used to keep, and some of them were pretty finicky.”

“Hey,” Gryffindor said, “what do you think would happen if I just tried reparo on, like, the whole castle? All at once?”

“I don’t think that would do anything,” Hufflepuff said.

“What if all four of us did it at the same time?”

“Doubt it,” Ravenclaw said. “I’m sure they tried something like that after the battle, when there were lots of wizards gathered here. We’ll probably have to repair it in smaller sections. Anyway,” she added, “I want to make changes to its original layout.”

“Balconies,” Slytherin said dryly.

“Yes.” She stopped the van. “We’re here.”

Hufflepuff was the first to climb out. “It’s so… big,” she called over the wind. “It didn’t look this big from far away.”

“I bet it’s bigger on the inside,” Ravenclaw said, grinning at Hufflepuff, who snorted.

As they left the van, the friends grouped closer together so they could talk normally over the gale.

“Was that another reference to something I won’t get?” Slytherin asked.

“Yeah, probably,” Gryffindor said, shrugging.

“You two should’ve gone to muggle university like me, just for the entertainment value,” Ravenclaw said. Hufflepuff nodded in agreement.

“I see,” Slytherin said. “You spent four years hiding what you are so that you could learn about the glowing box thing.”

“That, and architecture,” Ravenclaw said. “And you should be glad I did, since you wouldn’t know a load bearing wall if it hissed at you.”

“Don’t listen to her, Bazzie.”

Gryffindor rattled the front doors of the castle. “Just our luck. These are still sturdy.” He tried ramming his shoulder up against the crack between the two doors, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Here, step back,” Slytherin said, and tried firing a few spells at it to get it to unlock or open. Nothing happened. Scowling, he said, “Well, we know one place where the protective spells didn’t break.”

“Maybe,” Ravenclaw said. “Or there’s something blocking them from the other side.”

“Hmm,” Hufflepuff said. “It’d be better if we could avoid destroying them. Maybe we should just find another way in?”

“Fair,” said Slytherin, while behind him Gryffindor was trying again to kick them in.

“I could try climbing up one of the walls that’s almost knocked down?” Gryffindor said, looking around at other areas of the castle. “Dunno if they’re stable after being blown up, though.”

“Probably shouldn’t risk it,” Ravenclaw said.

“We could blow them up more?” Gryffindor suggested.

“Let’s not unless we have to,” Ravenclaw said. “Besides, you were the one going on about booby traps. If they are still active, intentionally damaging the castle seems like something that would set them off.”

“We could fly in?” he tried. “It looks like there are holes in parts of the roof.”

“Hmm,” Ravenclaw said. “Let me scout that one out first.” She stepped back, transformed into a golden eagle, then flew up to the roof, fighting the harsh wind. When she returned, she was having so much trouble landing neatly on the ground that she chose a tree instead. She climbed down as a human, her hair looking as badly windblown as the bird’s feathers had been.

“Not a good idea,” she reported, combing her hair with her fingers. “There’s some kind of white stuff over the holes in the roof. I’m not sure what it is. I couldn’t land to get a closer look at it, either. It’s probably better to find another way in.”

“What about flying to an upper floor, then?” Gryffindor asked.

“I’d rather start from the ground floor until we know what parts of the castle are stable to walk on,” Ravenclaw said. “We’re less likely to disturb things if we start there. Besides, I don’t like the feeling of some of the spells in the air. I don’t know what they might do to a broomstick.”

“Plus, that’s a lot of wind to fly in,” Hufflepuff said. “I know we’re less likely to be blown off course than an eagle, but it doesn’t look like fun.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Slytherin asked.

“Maybe,” Ravenclaw said. “We might be able to go over the lake. I read that it used to be traditional for new students to cross the lake when entering the castle for the first time, so maybe there’s another passage in that way.”

“Aww, that’s kind of symbolic,” Hufflepuff said. “Since it’s our first time too.”

“How are we gonna do that?” Gryffindor asked. “There aren’t still boats, are there?”

“I don’t know,” Ravenclaw said. “I don’t really know where to look, either. Sal’s the one who knows about the layout of the place.”

“There’s an underground harbor around here somewhere,” Slytherin said. “I don’t know how to get there. It’s somewhere on the other side of the lake. We might be able to summon up one of the boats if we can find its exact location, though.”

This turned out to be harder than they’d thought. The road had been clear enough for their van, but the soggy lawns had to be crossed on foot, and it was badly overgrown by the wilderness. However, the brambles were less resistant to magic than the front doors had been, and Hufflepuff coaxed them out of their path with her wand, magically uprooting them and getting them to move elsewhere.

“We don’t want to disturb things too violently,” she explained, “in case something in the forest takes offense.”

“What if instead of getting rid of the brambles later, we turned them into a maze?” Gryffindor asked. “That’d be awesome.”

“Why?” Ravenclaw asked.

“Because!”

Ravenclaw glanced from Gryffindor to Slytherin, who was still playing with the young basilisk around his shoulders, and decided this time not to argue about keeping something dangerous.

It took them a while to find the docks. Slytherin kept flipping through his journal, pulling up different notes and scrawled maps even as the wind tried to blow them away, until finally he managed to find the right place. “It’s here.” He closed his eyes, pointed his wand at the lake shore, and the others watched as he seemed to tug upwards at something with his wand.

Finally, the dock started to raise itself out of the water. It was covered in algae and mussels, and some of the boards were broken, but Slytherin cast a repair spell and declared it safe to step on. Gryffindor responded by jumping on it, in order to test it for everyone else. It held.

“I think I found one of the boats,” Hufflepuff called, from about six meters down the shore. “Sal, could you come help me with this? It’s bigger than I thought.”

Slytherin smiled. “Coming.”

After Slytherin was out of earshot, Gryffindor turned to Ravenclaw and made a gagging noise. She rolled her eyes at him.

This was what they overheard from Hufflepuff and Slytherin:

“Okay, so it’s here, can you sense that bit sticking out?”

“Ah, there. Got it.”

There were the sounds of a few spells being cast, and a lot of water moving around.

“Do you think it’ll actually carry…”

“Hold on.”

A big splashing sound.

“Eep! Watch out, there’s a big crab—”

“I got it, I got—whoa whoa whoa whoa”

“I said big!”

Then several spells, which made a whoosh, a creak, and then a bang noise.

“We’re okay!”

“Um…!”

A pause. A loud splash. More creaking. A quieter splash.

“Now we’re okay!”

A few minutes later, they returned much more serenely, with Slytherin propelling the boat using his wand while Hufflepuff used hers to dry out his cloak. Gryffindor started to ask why, but Ravenclaw stepped on his foot before he could finish.

“Sal? …Where’s your snake?” she asked instead as they got into the boat.

Slytherin grabbed for his collar, but the baby basilisk was nowhere to be found. Panicked, he spoke a stream of Parseltongue, apparently calling out for it.

“Did you drop it in the lake by accident?” Ravenclaw asked hopefully.

“Oh no!” Slytherin peered over the boat edge at the water. “I’m taking us back.”

But then Hufflepuff squeaked in surprise. “Oh!” Slytherin’s cloak was moving. She unfolded it, and revealed the creature, which was desperately trying to answer Slytherin’s call. “Oh, Sal, it’s panicked, take the poor thing back—”

This was unnecessary, because Slytherin had already shot out his hand to let the basilisk climb back up onto his shoulders.

“Really? You too?” Ravenclaw asked her friend.

“What?”

“The poor thing,” Ravenclaw mimicked.

“It’s still a living creature,” Hufflepuff said, pouting.

“All right, all right, don’t break out the puppy dog eyes.”

Gryffindor laughed. “Those are a lethal weapon, Puff. You gotta be careful. The basilisk might think you’re cribbing its style.”

“Nonsense.” Hufflepuff folded her arms. “I’m much cuter than a basilisk, and I don’t think anyone would be able to argue with that.”

Everyone looked at Slytherin.

“No comment,” Slytherin said, not looking up from his boat-propelling spell, the snake now coiled serenely around his shoulders again. It flicked its tongue at them.

“Because you don’t want to add insult to injury after you accidentally dumped a deadly snake in your girlfriend’s lap?” Gryffindor asked.

“No, Gryf,” Ravenclaw said, over Slytherin’s sputtering. “It’s because he secretly agrees, but the snake will bite him if he says so.”

Hufflepuff was busy neatly folding Slytherin’s cloak and pretending she couldn’t hear the conversation. Slytherin, copying her, chose not to respond verbally (he couldn’t help his ears going pink) and busied himself by making the boat go faster.

When they finally arrived at the other side of the lake, Gryffindor bounded up to the door and threw it open. Delighted, he turned around, declaring, “It’s unlocked!”

And then an acromantula stepped out and grabbed him.

“Impedimenta!” Gryffindor yelled at the spider, but he couldn’t reach far enough around to hit it squarely.

“I can’t get a clear shot!” Slytherin panted, sprinting up the shore along with the others running behind. “I don’t want to hit him—”

Giving up on the spell, Gryffindor reached for his sword, which took him several seconds to grab, and slashed at the spider’s legs. At last, he managed a deep scratch at its underbelly, which was lightly armored enough that the monster lowered him as it dropped its posture to curl up around the wound.

The acromantula’s moment of hesitation was enough. Slytherin fired a nonverbal spell into its eyes. The spider promptly dropped Gryffindor and staggered off toward the forest.

Gryffindor slowly got up, pebbles stuck to his face. He spat out some sand. “Thanks, Sal.”

“Nice shot,” Slytherin said, as Gryffindor picked up his sword and gave it a little shake, the acromantula blood sliding clean off the goblin silver. “Good aiming for the stomach.”

“Thanks,” Gryffindor repeated as he returned the sword to its place at his belt. “Though if you don’t mind me saying so,” he added, rubbing the ribs he’d landed on, “it would’ve been nice if you’d just used a verbal spell so I’d known when the thing was about to drop me?”

“I’ll remember that for the next time you get grabbed by a monster,” Slytherin said dryly.

“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not,” Hufflepuff said. “Are you okay, Gryf?”

“Yeah. Where’d Ravenclaw go?”

“She followed the spider,” Hufflepuff said. “I think she’s making sure it’s actually leaving the castle.”

“Awesome,” Gryffindor said. “That means we can go look inside without her making us stop every three feet.”

“But she does that because it’s dangerous!”

“Yeah—boring!” he said, grinning. “I didn’t go looking for a booby-trapped abandoned magical castle to be safe. Come on!” And he ran inside, through the doorway he’d just been attacked by.

Slytherin put his hand on Hufflepuff’s shoulder. “Our motto is, let Godric go first,” he said. “He’ll trigger any traps ahead of us. Don’t worry. He’s having fun.”

“That is what I’m worried about.”

“Fair.” He smiled at her. “We should probably follow him before he has too much fun.”

Five minutes later, Ravenclaw got back and did not find anyone waiting patiently at the door for her. She swore at herself for even considering the possibility and darted inside after her friends. Growing impatient with her running speed, she leapt into the air and transformed again, giving thanks in her mind for the wide, high-ceilinged hallways.

Of course, they weren’t hard to find. Ravenclaw looked for the center of the chaos—it was an algorithm that had never failed her yet. Her ears told her when she was getting close.

“No, wait, stop!”

“Why is it attacking us?”

“Petrificus totalus!”

“Wait, that worked?”

“Watch out, it’s falling!”

“I’ll hold it here! Set it upright so it’s stable!”

“Okay—no, wait, it’s still—!”

“I got it!”

“No!”

Crash!

Ravenclaw detransformed and turned the corner to reveal this tableau: a huge gargoyle statue broken into four or five pieces; Slytherin with his wand outstretched and his other hand raised into the air for no apparent reason; Gryffindor flat on the floor with his wand in hand, his leg pinned by a broken gargoyle wing piece; Hufflepuff fallen on top of him with both of her hands comically pushed out in front of her, as if she’d tried to shove Gryffindor out of the way. All of them were looking at Ravenclaw, waiting for her reaction.

She sighed. “Godric, you have a stone claw stuck in your hat.”

He wrinkled his nose at the sound of his given name and flung the claw aside.

After a few minutes, they managed to clear away the rubble, piling it into one corner of the hall.

“So the gargoyle attacked you when you tried to go in here?” Ravenclaw asked. “What is it, the headmaster’s office?”

“No, that’s way up on the seventh floor,” Slytherin said. “This is the old staff room.”

“Weird,” Ravenclaw said. “That seems like a lot of security for a staff room. Why did it attack you?”

“Maybe its spell got messed up, like the rest of this place,” Gryffindor suggested.

Slytherin sighed. “Or maybe it’s me. The last time this castle saw one of my family members, it… well. I don’t really blame it for trying to smack me.”

Hufflepuff patted him on the shoulder. “Well, maybe we can get into the staff room now,” she said.

Ravenclaw rattled the doors. “Locked.”

She tried a couple spells on the lock, but it was protected. Next, she tried to move the pins out of the door hinges by magic, but it seemed that the door itself was acting as a shield against magic. “Tsk,” she said. “This isn’t working. It’s a shame, because this wouldn’t be a bad place to sleep if it’s spell-proofed this well.”

Gryffindor gave the doors a solid back kick, but they stayed shut and he almost fell over. “I didn’t think that’d work,” he said, “but someday it will and it’s gonna be awesome. Sal, you got any ideas?”

“Nothing Rowena hasn’t already done.”

“Here, let me try,” Hufflepuff said.

Gryffindor frowned in confusion but stepped back to let her through. Hufflepuff was rummaging in her bag. Then she went up to the lock, slid something in between the doors, turned the handle, and the door clicked open.

Hufflepuff turned around, beaming. “Ta-daaaa!” She was holding up a credit card.

“You what?” Ravenclaw asked.

“It’s spell-proofed,” Hufflepuff said cheerfully. “It’s not protected against muggle-style break-ins. I also have lockpicks!”

“Are we about to find out about your secret criminal past or something?” Gryffindor asked enthusiastically.

“Um, no?”

“Darn it. Well, tell us when you feel ready, I guess.”

Slytherin punched him on the shoulder. “Quit messing with her and let’s go in.”

“Ooh,” Ravenclaw said as they stepped into the staff office.

“Ooh what?” Hufflepuff asked. “The mess, or the ‘broken spells headache’ thing going away?”

“Both,” Ravenclaw said. “I think this place is well shielded.”

“But not well organized,” Slytherin said, looking around. The place was dominated by a scattered paper mess—lots of maps and records, and a number of books, some of which seemed to have been thrown across the room. There was also a half-shattered medical potions kit that had melted away part of the stone in one corner (and left a very suspicious sticky spot). On one table was a tray that held what might once have been someone’s lunch.

“Is that salt pork?” Hufflepuff asked.

“Something like that,” Gryffindor said. “And I think the fuzzy thing next to it used to be bread.”

“That’s a good sign,” Ravenclaw said.

“What, moldy food?” Gryffindor asked.

Slytherin nodded. “It means that the acromantula wasn’t able to get in here,” he said. “And neither could anything else. Otherwise, that meat would have been eaten a long time ago.”

“Are you sure?” Gryffindor asked, grinning. “I wouldn’t eat it.”

“Really?” Slytherin asked.

“Not without mustard. I have standards. But as it is,” he added, “it’s kinda grossing me out. If we’re turning this into our base, I’m gonna get rid of it.” He grabbed the tray, walked out of the room and across the hall, found a convenient broken window, and then chucked the entire mess out into the grounds.

“You could have just set it down in the hall?” Ravenclaw said when he came back. She and Slytherin had stepped out of the staff room to see what he was doing.

“I’ve already been chomped by a giant spider once today,” Gryffindor said. “Don’t need to bait another one.”

“I need to make a note of this,” Slytherin said, opening his journal back up. “Gryf did something smart.”

“Hey!”

“I think he means, you didn’t take the opportunity to pick a fight with another monster,” Ravenclaw said.

“Oh, the boring kind of smart.” Gryffindor shrugged. “Yeah, well, I don’t have all day.”

Hufflepuff opened the door again so the broom she’d charmed could sweep the dirt out of the room. Behind her, the papers from the floor were busy shuffling themselves into neat stacks. The wardrobe that used to hold staff members’ cloaks was wide open, and the patterns of dust on the floor suggested that Hufflepuff had blasted it with a gust of air from her wand.

“That’s better,” she said, watching the cleanup. “And nothing even attacked me! Isn’t that nice?”

Slytherin frowned slightly. “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, either,” he said.

“Not really, I’m afraid,” she admitted. “Can we look for the kitchens next? Since we have a place to sleep, I mean.”

“I don’t think they’ll be fit to cook in,” Gryffindor hazarded. “And we might have to figure out a better way of disposing of whatever food is left in there. I don’t know if it’s a great idea to just throw it all into the grounds.”

“He keeps doing it,” Slytherin said.

“Look, I don’t have to start a fight with every monster,” Gryffindor complained. “This place is full of monsters. I get to be picky, all right?”

“I’m so proud of you,” Ravenclaw said.

He sighed. “My friends are jerks.”

“Sal, which way are we going?” Hufflepuff said, changing the subject.

“Oh. This way, I think.”

On the way, they had to contend with a nest of doxies, which took about a dozen knockback jinxes to pass. Then half of the staircase they needed to use was blocked by overgrown vines, which Gryffindor hacked out of their way with his sword. Slytherin marked the doxy nest in his notes so they could deal with it more permanently later. By the time they got to the kitchens, Gryffindor was still poking fun at Hufflepuff for apologizing to the doxies as she jinxed them.

“Can’t we just relocate the nest to the forest or something?” she asked. “Do we have to kill them?”

Ravenclaw shook her head. “They like infesting buildings too much.”

“They’re really venomous, Helga,” Slytherin said. “And aggressive. Best not to give them any quarter really. Cheer up, we’re here.”

Gryffindor kicked the door open. For a split second, delight flashed on his face, until he realized—

“It wasn’t latched,” Ravenclaw pointed out.

“Eventually it’ll work!”

“Oh, dear,” Hufflepuff said, peering in.

The kitchen, like the staircase they’d just come by, was full of overgrown plants. A leak in one corner of the ceiling seemed to be supplying them with water. Ivy, grass, and some more exotic-looking plants stretched over the ovens, crept under the table, and climbed up the fireplace. The windows set high into the ceiling filtered a dim light through more leaves, filling the room with a green cast; the few sunbeams that made it through served mostly to highlight the dust floating through the air. The place smelled damp and slightly mildewy, and it was surprisingly cold. Gryffindor sneezed.

“No, don’t,” Hufflepuff said, before Slytherin could walk further into the room. “Some of these plants, I don’t want anyone going near until I’ve figured out what they are. I can see a patch of devil’s snare and at least two venomous tentacula from here.”

“Can’t we just fireblast ‘em, then? Or chop them off the walls?” Gryffindor patted his sword.

“Not everything. And that plant over there—” she pointed to what looked like a strange, bendy purple tree growing under one of the windows “—would grab your sword right out of your hand and try to stab you with it.”

“Not gonna lie, that kind of sounds like fun.”

“The other reason,” Hufflepuff said, ignoring this, “is that I want to collect specimens. There may be plants in here that didn’t survive in the greenhouses, what with everything in there being in pots that might have dried up.”

“Are you sure you should be the one to do this?” Slytherin asked.

Hufflepuff jerked her head back, frowning at him.

“I mean—alone,” he amended hurriedly.

“I might ask for someone to help, yes,” she said, still looking mildly offended.

“Smooth,” Ravenclaw said under her breath, when Hufflepuff had started carefully crossing the room to get a better look. “You know, you could have just said you wanted to help.”

“Shut up.”

“His basilisk is glaring at you now,” Gryffindor pointed out, laughing. “It doesn’t even have eyes but it’s still trying to kill you.”

Ravenclaw primly took one step away from the snake, out of biting range.

“I think these tentacula have been living off the doxies,” Hufflepuff called from her side of the room. “We should probably expect to see more nests as we go. Oh, here’s the pantry. But, ugh, it smells like spoiled flour in here.”

“Flour spoils?” asked Slytherin, whose cooking knowledge wouldn’t have sufficed to boil water.

“It gets pests,” Hufflepuff explained, stepping back out of the pantry and closing the door behind her. “Gryf is right, we’re going to need a good way of getting rid of all this stuff. We should probably just vanish it, but that might be complicated since there’s a lot of living creatures in there.”

“Invertebrates, though?” Ravenclaw asked. “Like, weevils?”

“I think so.”

“Should be doable,” Ravenclaw answered. “We’ll need to do each container all in one go, though. We don’t want to set them loose.”

“Let’s tackle this tomorrow, I think,” Hufflepuff said, trying not to trip over the ivy as she retreated.

“Good idea,” Gryffindor said. “Should we go back upstairs? I want to know why the front door wouldn’t open.”

“We don’t have to pass that nest again to get there, do we?” Ravenclaw asked. “I just got done picking that one doxy’s claws out of my sleeve.”

“Not this time,” Slytherin answered. “It’s up the stairs but in a different direction.”

This trip was less eventful, although they did note some more serious damage to the castle. There were walls knocked down that Ravenclaw insisted on examining before she’d let them continue, and in a few of the more high-ceilinged areas which didn’t have additional floors, they could see patches where the roof had crumbled. Hufflepuff also insisted she could feel something watching them, but although she circled back a few times, she couldn’t find the source of her suspicions. Gryffindor kept his hand on his sword nevertheless.

“Ah,” Slytherin said as they rounded the corner into the entrance hall.

Ravenclaw stopped in her tracks.

“Well, there’s your problem,” Gryffindor said.

“What?” Hufflepuff asked, jogging to catch up. “Oh.”

The entrance hall was covered in acromantula webs. From the top of the grand staircase, they were fully able to appreciate the size of the giant webbed dome below. Its main structure was visible beneath them, but further webs stretched all the way up to the ceiling, which had multiple holes in it.

“I guess they can squeeze through their own webs to get in and out,” Hufflepuff said.

“The front doors are there, right?” Gryffindor asked.

Slytherin had to check in his notes to make sure. “Yes. It’s just that thick.”

“If the castle is this badly infested,” Ravenclaw asked, “then why haven’t we seen more acromantula?”

“Hmm,” Slytherin said, frowning. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, what do we do about all these webs?” Gryffindor asked. “Torch them?”

“That’s actually not a bad idea,” Ravenclaw said. “It’ll get rid of any eggs, and any tapestries or paintings under this mess are probably too damaged to bother about. I haven’t seen any occupied paintings yet, anyway, so their subjects are probably hiding somewhere else. But we’ll need to make sure we can contain the fire. And I’d like to keep the front doors intact, if we can.”

“Don’t you think that the spiders will attack us if we burn down their webs?” Hufflepuff asked.

“Maybe,” Ravenclaw said. “Ready to pick another fight, Gryf?”

“Oh, you know it.”

“All right,” she said. “Let’s prepare. I want to grab some of the piles of stones we’ve been passing and block off the exits. We don’t need to set fire to the whole castle. Then we’ll need to blow a hole in the roof. A bigger hole, I mean.”

“Sorry, what?” Slytherin asked.

“We don’t need to smoke ourselves out,” she explained. “Besides, it’s collapsing anyway. We’ll fix it later. And then we’ll need to be ready to defend ourselves against any spiders in the area, and to extinguish the fire after the webs are gone.”

“They might be flaming spiders by that point,” Gryffindor reminded everyone.

“That,” Ravenclaw said.

“We’re going to flood the dungeons trying to put out this fire, aren’t we,” Slytherin said flatly. “Are we sure this is the best way to do this?”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Slytherin sighed. “No.”

Then Hufflepuff dumped the first load of stones into place, blocking an exit. “Well?” she asked. “Are you just going to talk about this all day?”

“How many exits, Sal?” Gryffindor asked.

“Six. But let’s leave the one behind us unblocked.”

“Good plan.”

“Reducto!” Ravenclaw cleared a sizeable chunk of the roof with her curse. Further bits of ceiling came crashing down on the domed webs, along with a few small spiders, who skittered away from the group. “Huh,” Ravenclaw said. “They ran away?”

Slytherin was right behind her, levitating another pile of stones. “When Helga and Gryf come back, we should be ready,” he said, before sending the stones into a doorway on the other side of the hall. They could hear the spiders’ pincers rattling.

“One more, actually,” Hufflepuff said. “I’m going to use this pile to block up some of the cracks.”

“Hey, Sal!” Gryffindor grinned. “Whoever comes back first gets to light the nest on fire.”

“I don’t think that’s a—” Hufflepuff said, but both boys had gone running in opposite directions down the hall.

Ravenclaw rolled her eyes. “Let them. They’re having fun.”

“That’s what I’m worried about!”

Gryffindor won, tearing back down the hallway with his levitated rubble in tow and blocking off the last passage after only two minutes.

Ravenclaw shrugged. “Well, you do the honors, then.”

He grinned. “Incendio!”

The effect this had on the webs was a lot like what you’d get by blasting cotton candy with a garden hose. Immediately, about a dozen acromantula came pouring out of the hole Gryffindor created, and they were indeed on fire. Their pincers rattled and chattered menacingly as they advanced. Gryffindor drew his sword and moved into a stable fighting stance.

The thick hairs on the spiders’ backs, set ablaze, created a smell so staggeringly awful that Ravenclaw literally took a step back and tripped over a piece of rubble.

“Arania Exumai!” she yelled, flipping one of the encroaching acromantula onto the back of another, sending both tumbling briefly back down the staircase.

Gryffindor managed to spear one through its underbelly with his sword as it leapt, then grabbed his wand out from between his teeth and sent another tumbling down the staircase the way Ravenclaw had. Hufflepuff cast a spell that turned the stairs into a slick ramp, which sent five of the spiders skidding back down to the ground level and into the fire, but the remaining six or so were climbing the webs on the walls in order to surround them.

Then Slytherin returned with his pile of rubble. He dropped it and ran over, firing a jinx at the spider that was nearly on top of Ravenclaw. But then—

“They’re running away?” Hufflepuff asked, staring around in astonishment at the loud pincer rattling as the spiders retreated through the hole Ravenclaw had blasted in the ceiling. For a few seconds all they could do was watch in confusion until the acromantula had all left.

“Weird,” Gryffindor said. “Well, I guess we can start putting some of these fires out.”

Hufflepuff was already restoring the stairs so they could climb down.

Ravenclaw finally shook off her confusion and got up. Then—

“Ohhh,” she said as she came eye-to-eye with Slytherin. It was only audible now that the clicking, rattling spiders had left, but the basilisk around his neck was hissing loudly as it reared up, swaying back and forth.

“What?” Gryffindor asked. He hadn’t descended the stairs like Hufflepuff, preferring instead to stay on the balcony and play target practice with the stream of water from his wand.

“Here’s why the acromantula left,” Ravenclaw said, pointing. “This is why we’ve hardly seen any.”

“Oh!” Slytherin said. Then he broke into a huge grin. “Well done!” he told his pet, stroking it under the chin with a finger, and while the rest of his praises were completely unintelligible to the rest of the humans present, the basilisk seemed to be lapping it up.

“Sorry, uh, what?” Hufflepuff asked. She was busy extinguishing a smoldering rug. “Is this another one of those things that you guys with wizard parents all know about and I don’t?”

“Sort of. It’s not something you’ve studied, I think,” Ravenclaw said. “Spiders are terrified of basilisks. Nobody’s exactly sure why. There’s a running theory that it’s because the basilisk kills by eye contact, and spiders have a lot of eyes so they’re extra vulnerable.”

“Better not tell them too much about this one,” Gryffindor said, laughing.

“Shh!” Ravenclaw scowled at him.

His eyebrows flashed upwards as he cottoned on. “Oh, yeah. We don’t want them to know that this one’s extra dangerous for spiders in particular,” he said loudly.

“Quiet,” Ravenclaw said in a stage whisper. “You’ll let them in on the secret and we won’t be able to sell as much acromantula venom to fund the school.”

They paused.

“Do you think they’re gone?” Hufflepuff said.

“Now?” Ravenclaw asked, in a normal voice. “Probably. You have to be careful, though. They’re intelligent enough to understand human speech.”

“That acromantula venom thing is a good idea, though,” Slytherin said. “Here, Gryf. Let’s go see that one you skewered. I’ve got an empty thermos in my pack.”

“Oh, yeah! Might as well make use of it, huh?”

“We’re going to end up picking more spider fights because of this, aren’t we?” Ravenclaw muttered to herself as she went down the stairs to help Hufflepuff put out fires.

“Sheesh, this thing’s juicy,” Slytherin said a few minutes later, when the venom was still dripping. “The thermos is full.”

“Ew,” Hufflepuff said. “But, uh… good?” She peered over his shoulder, frowning.

“Here, you can use mine too,” Gryffindor said, pouring the last few dribbles of water from his canteen onto the floor and offering the container.

“Just make sure you don’t accidentally drink it,” Hufflepuff said, as Slytherin started to harvest venom into the canteen as well. “I’d hate for you to get up in the middle of the night when you’re not thinking straight, and…”

“We’ll lock it somewhere safe,” Slytherin said. “Don’t worry. Besides, as soon as we can get the broken spells cleared up and restored, and we know we can find this place again if we leave, we’ll be selling it off. Valuable stuff. I know where to find a buyer for it, too.”

“Oh,” Hufflepuff said. “In that case… do you think they’d take some of those venomous tentacula leaves? I know they’re used as potion ingredients, and those things really need pruning.”

Slytherin raised his eyebrows. “You’re right. I didn’t even think of that. Good thing we didn’t ‘fireblast’ them,” he added, looking at Gryffindor.

“Hey, it’s the answer sometimes,” Gryffindor said defensively.

“What’s Rowena doing?” Hufflepuff asked. Ravenclaw hadn’t come up the stairs to join them; she was pacing back and forth in front of the main doors.

“Don’t know,” Gryffindor said. “Let’s go ask.”

When they arrived, however, Ravenclaw held up her hand for silence. She seemed to be deep in concentration. Then she held up both her wand and her off-hand, and made a motion as if pushing lightly on something. Eyes shut, she stepped back, and pointed her wand at a spot on the wall above and slightly left of the doors, despite this looking no different from any other spot on the wall.

“Finite incantatem!”

Red sparks bounced off the wall. Nothing else happened.

Ravenclaw scowled at it. “Okay. Let’s try… Deletrius!”

Something broke. There was something like a sound, but not one that any of them heard with their ears. Hufflepuff took a half-step back from the shock wave. Ravenclaw got the worst of the recoil; she stumbled but managed to steady herself against the wall.

A few seconds later, she straightened up and pulled experimentally on the door. It opened.

“You got it!” Hufflepuff cried, clapping.

Ravenclaw gave a shaky thumbs-up.

“Excellent,” Slytherin said, coming down the stairs with both bottles of acromantula venom in hand. “Now we can get back to the van without backtracking across the lake.”

“Which means…” Gryffindor said, his eyes sparkling…

“Lunch!” Hufflepuff said.

Ravenclaw held her thumbs-up higher.

“I think Rowena gets a snack first, though,” Hufflepuff said, digging around in her pack.

“M’mfi-ine.”

“You’re not going anywhere until your eyes stop crossing and uncrossing,” Hufflepuff said, coming up with one and a half granola bars and a chocolate chip cookie. “Come on, quit being stubborn. It’s still a walk back.”

Gryffindor retrieved one of the flatter castle stones they’d used to block off the hallways, and Hufflepuff helped Ravenclaw sit down. Ravenclaw reached out to take the food Hufflepuff was offering, and missed. Hufflepuff grabbed her hand, folding her fingers around one of the granola bars.

“Next time, you let us help,” Hufflepuff scolded, once Ravenclaw had her mouth full and couldn’t interrupt. “No doing it all yourself just so you can be mysterious and badass.”

Ravenclaw mumbled.

“What’s that?” Gryffindor asked.

She swallowed her mouthful of granola. “Was for science.”

“I’m not even going to go into all the stupid stuff she’s done ‘for science,’” Hufflepuff said, folding her arms. “We’d be here all day."

“Let's at least get lunch first,” Gryffindor said.

“Good idea,” Slytherin said, getting up. “Let's go.”


	2. It's a bit of a fixer-upper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day one, part two. Gryf has a question about Pokemon. Helga pulls lunch out of her magic cooler. Sal officially names his basilisk. Sal and Rowena attempt some spell cleanup. Helga gets Very Angry, and Sal is... kind of into it. Rowena throws some theories around re: what the heck is going on. Sal and Gryf discover an unwanted guest.

Ravenclaw spent half of the trek back to their van trying not to step on Hufflepuff’s feet with her heavy black combat boots, as her friend insisted on stabilizing her with her shoulder. Gryffindor and Slytherin were in some kind of argument about magical creatures.

“Look, it makes sense,” Gryffindor was saying. “Basilisk beats acromantula. Rooster beats basilisk. That means acromantulas must love eating roosters.”

“Not everything is a rock-paper-scissors triangle,” Slytherin argued.

“Actually, I was thinking of Pokemon.”

“I treasure my lack of knowledge on this subject.”

“How about this?” Hufflepuff offered. “The basilisk is riding around on Sal’s shoulders, and we’re eating chicken salad for lunch.”

The look of delight rising on Gryffindor’s face lasted up until Slytherin said flatly, “Stop.”

Gryffindor glared at his friend. “Let me have this.”

“I’ll let you have chicken salad if you unlock the van,” Hufflepuff said.

“Fair enough.” He opened the trunk.

“I’m fine,” Ravenclaw said, more coherently this time. Hufflepuff finally let her go. She sat on the back bumper while Hufflepuff unlocked her cooler with one of her personal nonverbal charms.

This cooler, a magically enchanted artifact created by Hufflepuff herself as a practicality measure during the months they’d spent looking for the castle, was much deeper—and stayed cool much longer—than one might assume. In essence, it was really more like a well-disguised, portable refrigerator. Hufflepuff had to take it out of the van to fully extend it. It sank a little bit into the soggy grass, because it was also much heavier than it appeared. She opened the lid and pulled on the top of a shelf-like wire structure, which slid upward as if on casters. Hufflepuff refused to teach the others how to unlock it, and was a bit secretive about what she kept inside—although less so with Ravenclaw than with the boys.

The reason became obvious when Ravenclaw peered over. One of the seven wire baskets was completely dedicated to cookies. Neither Gryffindor nor Slytherin had any self-control when it came to Hufflepuff’s homemade cookies, and it made sense that she didn’t want them to know the extent of her hoard. Among the items in the other baskets were fruits and vegetables, mustard, mayonnaise, bread, salt and pepper, juice boxes (there were a lot of these), milk, eggs, around a dozen parchment-wrapped sandwiches, and in the bottom and deepest basket, two pounds of bacon and two large parchment-wrapped packages labeled “pork chops” and “steak” in Hufflepuff’s loose cursive.

Whoops, Hufflepuff had caught her staring. Rather than looking annoyed, however, she raised one finger to her lips over a mischievous smile. Ravenclaw glanced at the boys—yep, still arguing loudly about monsters—raised her right hand, and whispered, “I solemnly swear not to tell Salazar Slytherin that you have a dozen of his favorite extra-large chocolate shortbreads.”

Hufflepuff snorted. She tapped an orange with her wand so that it fell into eight neatly sliced wedges. “Take this to him, will you?” She handed Ravenclaw the beeswax cloth bundle she’d just been preparing. One parchment-wrapped sandwich; one orange, sliced; one Capri Sun; and—yes—one giant chocolate shortbread cookie.

“You spoil him,” Ravenclaw said, getting up.

“Says the girl who’s already gotten one of my chocolate chip cookies today,” Hufflepuff said primly, as she deftly wrapped another package.

“Hang on,” Ravenclaw said. “What’s this?” She’d just spotted a tiny parchment paper package, wrapped with absurd neatness, in Slytherin’s bundle.

“That’s for…” Hufflepuff started, but hesitated. “Sal! What’s her name?”

“Nefertiti,” he yelled back.

“That’s for Nefertiti,” Hufflepuff said, going back to packing Gryffindor’s lunch.

It turned out to be a little chunk of steak. Slytherin was trying and failing to disguise how happy he was about Hufflepuff packing his basilisk her own lunch.

When Ravenclaw came back, Hufflepuff caught a glimpse of her expression and sighed. “She did drive off all those acromantula for us,” she pointed out.

“Nefertiti?” Ravenclaw asked. “Really?”

“Well, did you actually think he was going to name her Bazzie? That’s not nearly dignified enough,” Hufflepuff pointed out. “We’re talking about Salazar Slytherin. Have you met the guy?”

“How did you know the basilisk was a girl?”

“The boys have this red plume thing on their head.”

“Yeah, but how did you know that?” Ravenclaw repeated.

“Sal has models of them at home.”

“See, you keep answering questions,” Ravenclaw complained, “but they’re just giving me more questions.”

“Shush,” Hufflepuff said. “Here, these are yours and Gryf’s. Don’t mix them up, he hates the cinnamon raisin cookies you like.”

“An extra half sandwich?” Ravenclaw asked, peering into hers. The other package also felt particularly heavy.

“He’s been hacking at spiders and doxies all day, and you almost KO’d yourself with weird psychic spell recoil,” Hufflepuff said.

“Thanks, I think.”

“You’re welcome.” Hufflepuff wrapped up the last package—her own—and pushed the wire shelf back into the cooler. She shut the lid and redid the charm that locked it, then joined her friends. Slytherin and Gryffindor had spread a blanket out on the lawn. Gryffindor was busy eating his lemon bar first.

“Helga, you should open a diner or something,” Slytherin said. “I don’t know how sandwiches can taste this good.”

“You should open it with me,” she said. “We could call it… Steak ‘n’ Snake!”

Ravenclaw snorted at the pun. Slytherin had frozen in place. Hufflepuff was too busy unwrapping her lunch to notice that the tips of his ears had gone pink again.

“There’s an American muggle diner chain called Steak ‘n’ Shake,” Ravenclaw explained, giving him an out to explain his behavior. “There used to be one in Chester that we visited a lot during university. I don’t think anybody wants to eat basilisk.”

“Oh. Ha ha. Heh. Right.” He covered his embarrassment by going back to his food.

“But it would be cute to have a banana split sundae shaped like a basilisk,” Hufflepuff suggested.

“We’re already opening a school,” Ravenclaw reminded them.

“Right!” Hufflepuff said. “Well, as a consolation prize, maybe you’ll help me clean out the kitchens tomorrow. Won’t it be nice to have an actual usable oven, and not just a campfire? I mean, cookies last a while in the cooler before they’ll go stale, but think about being able to have pot roast, pies, roasted squash, pasties…”

“Sheesh, Helga, I’ll help you clean it out tonight if that’s the menu,” Gryffindor said.

“Not quite yet, I’m afraid,” she said. “I don’t have the ingredients. And we’ll need to clear up some of these spells before we can safely go shopping for groceries, or anything else for that matter. I want to be able to Apparate here, at least outside the gates.”

“So are we agreed that that’s what we’re doing this afternoon?” Ravenclaw asked.

“Yes, but more than one of us at once this time,” Hufflepuff said protectively.

“I don’t know if that’ll actually help,” Ravenclaw said. “It’ll make our spell stronger, but the ripple effect from it interacting with the broken spell might be just as bad.”

“But it affected you the worst because you were the caster,” Hufflepuff pointed out.

“Right,” she said. “But that might also mean that anyone involved in casting the spell gets knocked back like that.”

“So we try two of us at once,” Slytherin said, unwrapping his cookie, “and see if it’s any better. For science. Then if it isn’t, we’re not all incapacitated.”

“Fair,” Ravenclaw said.

They wrapped up their lunch and spent the next hour hunting down another spell fragment. It was a game of hot and cold, using the headache effect that the broken spells gave them; Ravenclaw seemed particularly sensitive in this regard. More difficult than getting directions, however, was navigating the terrain. Twice they came upon large obstacles: they had to find a different way around a thicket of Whomping Willows (“Why did they have these planted at a school?!” Ravenclaw complained) and wait twenty minutes at a distance for a herd of feral hippogriffs crossing the grounds ahead of them. 

Finally, they came to a stop in a clearing about a quarter mile in from the wrecked viaduct.

“It’s there,” Ravenclaw said, pointing to a spot about sixty feet off the ground.

“Well. Great.” Gryffindor folded his arms and squinted up at the area Ravenclaw had indicated. “That’s… real easy to see. Two of us are supposed to hit the same spot at once?”

“Yes,” she said. “And if we miss, well… I don’t know what might happen.”

“What spell are we using?” Hufflepuff asked.

“Eradication worked on the last one,” Ravenclaw said. “But I’m not sure if this one will be the same way.”

“Great,” Gryffindor repeated. “We’re aiming at a really specific patch of air only Rowena can locate, with a spell we aren’t sure will work.”

“I can feel it,” Slytherin said, holding up both hands and prodding at the air with his wand, the way Ravenclaw had in the entrance hall. “I think I know which spot you mean.”

“Well,” Ravenclaw said, gripping her wand more tightly, “let’s try it. On three, then. Gryf, count us down?”

“Three,” Gryffindor said, stepping back. “Two… One.”

Ravenclaw and Slytherin’s spells both shot high into the air…

…and hit different places.

The recoil was worse this time. Slytherin stumbled backwards, tripped over his own robes, and fell, with Nefertiti hissing in surprise and wiggling around, trying to keep her own balance. Ravenclaw just collapsed.

“She’s out cold,” Hufflepuff said, rolling Ravenclaw into recovery position and checking her pulse just in case.

Slytherin groaned as he tried to stand up. “I don’t know why, but I sort of thought Rowena was exaggerating before. She wasn’t. This is… not great.”

“At least you’re speaking to us,” Hufflepuff said. “Rowena didn’t at first, last time.”

“So what happened?” Gryffindor asked. “I can tell something’s gone, but… did one of you miss or what?”

“I don’t think so,” Slytherin said, giving up on trying to stand and propping his head in his hands. “I think we sensed… different broken spells, and we both hit them, but she was too depleted to take another round like that.”

“She’s coming to,” Hufflepuff said. “We’re going to have to be really, really careful cleaning this place up. I don’t think we can chase down all the spells tonight. Maybe we should get Ravenclaw back to the staff room, where she’ll be shielded from all this.”

Ravenclaw blinked at them.

“Rowena?” Hufflepuff asked.

She got a small nod and a wincing frown in return. Apart from that, Ravenclaw didn’t move.

“Is it okay if I carry you back?” Hufflepuff asked.

Another nod.

“Don’t try to transform,” Hufflepuff warned her. “Sal, how are you feeling?”

He stood up. “Fine.”

“I’m choosing to believe you,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Could you two get our camping gear, please? And my medical kit. We’ll meet you back in the staff room.” She picked up Ravenclaw in a fireman’s carry.

“Are you sure about this?” Gryffindor asked. “You don’t know what you’re going to run into on your way back.”

Hufflepuff glared at him so strongly that he took a step back. “Yes. Please retrieve the things I asked for.” Then she walked off at a steady clip, back the way they’d come. Soon she was out of earshot.

“Well, damn,” Gryffindor said, impressed. He paused. “I know Rowena’s not very heavy, but… does Helga not know the feather-light charm?”

“She’s good at it,” said Slytherin, not looking away from the retreating girls. “She can use it nonverbally. I… guess she was so focused that she wasn’t thinking about it.”

“Huh.” Gryffindor scratched his beard. “Remind me not to make her mad.”

Slytherin just kept staring after Hufflepuff, his face starting to go pink again.

Gryffindor looked over at his friend. “…Okay,” he said, after a few seconds. “I get it.”

Slytherin half-raised his hands as if about to try to say something, but then dropped them again. “Yeah.”

“Let’s go get her stuff,” Gryffindor said. “I’d hate to see what she’d do to us if we didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Slytherin repeated, following him.

“You want me to carry you to the van?” Gryffindor asked, grinning.

Slytherin rolled his eyes. “No.”

“So, uh, how okay are you, actually, and how much was for her benefit?”

“I’m all right. Kind of dizzy; nasty headache. It’ll pass.”

“Say something if you need to stop.”

“Something if you need to stop.”

“Ha ha.”

Meanwhile, Hufflepuff stormed across the grounds, using curses and severing charms to clear the plants blocking her path rather than nicely getting them to move, then stunning the angry Knarls that popped out of nearby bushes to exact revenge for their damaged homes. Once back in the castle, she took a slightly different route to the staff room; Slytherin had earlier suggested it as an alternative to passing the doxy nest again. But, as it turned out, opening one of the doors disturbed an unseen glumbumble hive. 

“Oh, Immobulus!” she snapped at the angry gray insects, then blasted the now-immobile creatures out of the way with a gust of air from her wand.

After only ten minutes, she arrived back at the staff room, only to realize that another stone gargoyle had taken up station outside the door. It glared at her.

She glared back. “I’m one of this school’s new teachers, I need to get into the staff room, and if you don’t get out of the way, I’ll be putting your pieces back together later. Understand?”

Apparently it did, because it moved.

“You din’ actually have to…” Ravenclaw slurred from her shoulders.

“Shush,” Hufflepuff said, laying Ravenclaw on the floor in recovery position again. “You didn’t actually have to be an idiot again, but here we are.”

“I didn’ know it would do that.”

“So much book learning, not enough common sense,” Hufflepuff muttered, digging around in her pack again. “Here. Eat this.” It was chocolate.

“Wasn’t dementors.”

“No,” Hufflepuff said, “or I guess, probably not. We don’t really know what those spells are, anyway. We can’t rule out dark magic. But it’s done some kind of psychic-y damage, and you probably need the sugar anyway. Besides, chocolate won’t hurt you, and the boys haven’t come back with my potions kit. So eat up.”

Half a mile away, Gryffindor shook Slytherin’s shoulder. “Hey. I think Helga was here.”

“I’m still dizzy. Am I really seeing…” Slytherin squinted in the direction Gryffindor was pointing.

“A giant round hole through the middle of that Whomping Willow thicket? Yeah, you are. I think she took a shortcut.”

“Let’s speed up.”

“Best idea you’ve had all day, mate.”

By the time they caught up, Ravenclaw was sitting up with her back against the wall, and Hufflepuff had a fire started in the grate.

“Did you clear out the ventilation?” Slytherin asked, trying to peer up the chimney. “I’d hate for those vines to—”

“I cleared it,” she said. “The medical kit, please.”

“Here,” Slytherin said.

Much like her cooler, Hufflepuff unlocked the wooden box with her wand, then pulled up on the copper rack inside. Phials of potions—essence of dittany, Wigganweld potion, calming draught, Wideye potion, some kind of smoky purple antiseptic, a variety of antidotes, and…

“Here,” Hufflepuff said, holding up another purple potion.

“What is that, a wit sharpener?” Slytherin asked, squinting at it.

Gryffindor shrugged. “Not a bad idea.”

“Ah,” Ravenclaw mumbled. “That does make sense.”

“Because you’re acting like you’ve been Confunded,” Hufflepuff explained, “and this reverses that. Besides, if it doesn’t work—”

“—it won’t hurt us,” Ravenclaw finished. “Good plan. Make sure you have enough for Sal, too.”

“Hey,” Slytherin said. “Am I supposed to be offended?”

“Don’t make this complicated,” Ravenclaw said, accepting the measure of potion Hufflepuff poured for her.

“If we’re going to keep getting hit with spells like this,” Hufflepuff said, “I’m going to brew more Wit tonight. And I’m keeping the Wideye potion in my bag in case one of you idiots knocks yourself out again.”

“We don’t actually know if there’s a way to prevent that,” Ravenclaw said.

“How about, don’t do it alone twice in one day?” Hufflepuff suggested.

“Well, when you put it like that…”

“Do you think we’re going to see a lot of areas with multiple spell-breaking points right next to each other?” Slytherin asked.

“I don’t know,” Ravenclaw said. “I didn’t even notice the one you wound up hitting, but it was obviously there.”

“What I want to know is why Sal wasn’t affected as badly as Rowena,” Hufflepuff said.

“I’m not sure,” Slytherin said. “Rowena is better at Divination than I am. Maybe she’s generally more sensitive to this kind of thing. Vibrations and whatnot.”

“Hmm,” Hufflepuff said. “I guess that makes sense. You were having the easiest time tracking down the spell’s breaking point, right, Rowena?”

“It also helped when you gave me the chocolate, though,” Ravenclaw said.

“Why is that relevant?” Slytherin asked.

“Well, Helga did give you that giant death-by-chocolate cookie in your lunch,” Ravenclaw pointed out. “Maybe it works preventively.”

“Ooh, good idea,” Hufflepuff said. “I can work with that. And it sounds like you’re thinking more clearly, so the potion seems effective.”

“Aren’t you going to run out of cookies?” Gryffindor asked.

A second passed before Hufflepuff replied. “Well, we’re going to have access to the kitchens soon if we can get the spells cleared up,” she said quickly, to cover her hesitation.

“I knew it,” Gryffindor said. “She’s got an infinite cookie stash.”

“No, I do not!”

“So what are you going to do for the rest of the evening, Gryf?” Ravenclaw asked, before he could pursue the topic further. “Helga wants to brew more potion, and I don’t think she’s going to let me do anything else today—”

“Damn right,” Hufflepuff interrupted.

“—so it seems like you guys have some time to kill.”

“Well,” Gryffindor said, “a cautious person wouldn’t go out into the grounds after dark, what with the forest being so overgrown.”

“You are currently a cautious person,” Slytherin said, “or else.”

“Fine. Then, shouldn’t we get the rest of our stuff in? If we’re camping out in here, like.”

“Good idea,” Hufflepuff said.

It wasn’t long before Gryffindor and Slytherin came back, towing everyone’s packs and tents along in the air with their wands. They set to work pushing the room’s tables and chairs against one wall to make a clear space on the floor, large enough to set up the enchanted tents they usually used while camping. These were too cheap to have anything fancy like a kitchen, but they did include comfortable cots and afforded them a certain amount of privacy. This work seemed to go by unusually quickly; by the time they were finished, Hufflepuff wasn’t done with her potion yet. 

“Thanks for your hard work,” Hufflepuff said, looking up from her task with a warm smile. “I can start dinner while this is simmering, but it’ll be a while. Try to stay out of trouble, won’t you? It won’t do for you two to get hurt.”

“And don’t go too far,” Ravenclaw warned them. “We still haven’t checked out the structural integrity of any of the upper floors.”

“Not to mention, I still feel a bit like we’re being watched,” Hufflepuff muttered.

“Okay, mommm,” Gryffindor said. “We’ll be careful.” He and Slytherin stepped out into the hall again. 

In the quiet of the staff room, Hufflepuff relaxed next to the crackling fire. She used her wand to gently move her cauldron of Wit to a cooler spot, and as it cooled and the bubbling surface stilled, its smell became less acrid and bitter, and mellowed out to a more pleasant scent of ginger ale.

As she did every evening, she took the feather-light charm off her cast iron frying pan (for some reason, it interfered with the cooking if she didn’t) and placed it carefully in the fireplace, giving it time to heat up.

One of the boys had brought in her cooler. She dragged it closer to her workspace, unlocked and opened it, chose some ingredients, and gathered a few tools. She settled next to the fire again, using parchment paper weighed down with a couple of stones as a work surface, and started using her wand to peel potatoes and dice onions.

Finally, she broke the cozy silence. “You’ve been reading that page for the past twenty minutes.”

Ravenclaw, who’d been sitting against the wall next to the fire with one of the books from her pack, now dropped it into her lap with a flat thwup sound. “I’ve been staring at this page for the past twenty minutes,” she corrected.

“Something wrong?”

“I keep thinking about what you said. About how we don’t know what these spells really are.”

“I just said that so you’d stop arguing with me.”

“But you were right. And your chocolate idea worked. I really didn’t expect that.”

“So you’ve been trying to figure out why.”

Ravenclaw folded her arms tightly. “I don’t like that we don’t know what we’re doing. This might be the biggest mess in the castle, and we need to deal with it immediately. Besides, I think it’s having some strange effects.”

“Like what?”

Ravenclaw hesitated. “I’m not sure yet.”

“But you have a suspicion.”

“I do… but the evidence so far is pretty thin. I have to think about it more before I’m willing to make my theory.”

“Hmm,” Hufflepuff said. She decided to drop the subject; Ravenclaw would talk when she wanted to. A touch regretfully, she Vanished the potato peelings, thinking that they needed to set up a compost heap soon. She kept working. Ravenclaw went back to her book.

The boys were apparently still exploring. The fire crackled on. Hufflepuff carefully arranged four steaks in the cast iron pan, which immediately started hissing and sizzling.

“You haven’t noticed anything odd, have you?” Ravenclaw finally asked, as the noise from the pan died down.

“In the castle? You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Time,” Ravenclaw said.

“Hmm,” Hufflepuff said again. She folded her arms and stared at the fire.

“I know,” Ravenclaw said. “There’s not much information to go on yet.”

“Is there usually anything left of moldy bread after twenty years, though?” Hufflepuff asked. “I think it’s a good question.”

“But I’m not sure…” Ravenclaw hesitated. “I don’t think that…” She stopped.

“It’s not everywhere,” Hufflepuff finished.

“I think it’s passing at different rates in different places in the castle,” Ravenclaw said. “In here, I think it’s slow. Out in the grounds it seems a little faster, but maybe not everywhere.”

“Do you think it’s the broken spells?”

Ravenclaw nodded. “I think it might be what was giving us a headache earlier.”

“But that stopped in here.”

“Yes… I wonder if that’s part of why the castle was so hard to find. Maybe places have to be connected by time as well as space to be… really next to each other, I guess. If there are ripples…”

“Then that means we really need to clean up all these spells before we leave.”

Ravenclaw nodded. “It might mean we need to clean up the spells before we actually can. But all of this is speculation. It still doesn’t give us much of a clue what the spells are, or why Sal can see ones I can’t and vice versa.”

“Is that what you’ve been reading about?”

“No,” she said. “That’s what’s been distracting me from reading. This book has a spell that I think could be used to mark break points that not all of us can see.”

“Oh! That sounds useful.”

“Only if all of us manage to learn it. And we need an ingredient—Billywig stings. There’s probably a stock of them in the potions room, wherever that is, but it might be too old to use.”

“Unless time has been moving oddly in there too,” Hufflepuff pointed out.

“Right. It might as easily be moving extra fast, though.”

“Don’t worry,” Hufflepuff said dryly, turning over the steaks. “With our luck, there’ll be a nest of the things somewhere in the castle that we’ll have to deal with anyway.”

“They’re native to Australia,” Ravenclaw said doubtfully.

“Don’t rule it out.”

Meanwhile, Gryffindor and Slytherin were exploring. They’d torched a patch of devil’s snare to get into the Great Hall, which was still lit by the enchanted candles and the night stars far above.

“Three tables,” Gryffindor said. “For the Houses, right?”

Slytherin nodded. “I think they’re marked, actually.” He used his wand to blow the dust from a symbol set into the top of the nearest one, revealing a triangle. “This one was the Cloaks’ table.”

“I always thought that was a weird idea,” Gryffindor said. “Using a story about death to shape a school. Seems kinda dark for kids.”

“The Dumbledores always were… well, very relaxed about that kind of thing,” said the wizard with a deadly snake casually coiled around his neck.

“I’m not. This is weird. If we bring back Houses, it needs to be about… what we value, like. Which kids we get along with. Skip the existential crisis. Hey, what’s this?”

There were footprints in the dust, near the teachers’ table. Smaller than a human’s, they looked narrow and almost claw-like.

“Huh,” Gryffindor said. “Wonder what this is.”

“There.” Slytherin was staring at one of the busted windows, where a pair of yellow eyes glowed with reflected light. He reached for his wand, but the creature disappeared. Gryffindor only caught a glimpse of it before all that was left were echoes of high-pitched giggling. 

“Uuuugh, not them,” Gryffindor said. “Why are they here?”

Both friends froze.

“Oh, no,” Gryffindor said.

“Tell me again how dark the old House system was?” Slytherin asked, with bitter irony.

“Maybe the Hallows helped the children avoid the Erklings in the old days...”

“I think this group showed up more recently. After the school closed.”

“Eww. We really need to get going on that mausoleum.”

“I don’ t think that will drive them away, though,” Slytherin said. “It’s been twenty years—probably there’s nothing left, and they’ve found something else to eat.”

“I know, but still.”

“Yeah, I get it. Skeletons all over the place? We don’t need to pander to their design aesthetic.”

“Sal!”

“Speaking of which,” Slytherin said, “maybe we can get this place cleaned up a bit. If we start hunting Erklings right now, He—I mean, the girls will be… annoyed with us.”

“Aww,” Gryffindor said, grinning. “You do what she—”

Slytherin punched him on the arm, making a face.

“Yeah, yeah. This dust is making me sneeze. Let’s do some housework. There’ll be a broom cupboard around here somewhere, right?”

“Let’s look out in the corridor.”

“This place looks kind of creepy in the moonlight,” Gryffindor said.

“Moonlight?” Slytherin asked. “I didn’t realize it was that late.”

“Guess so. It’s not making these windows look any less grimy, though.”

“I think this might be…” Slytherin said, opening a door. But instead he found another corridor, with a shape that he assumed at first glance was some kind of cloth covering a piece of furniture, which was fluttering in the breeze from the broken windows. But then he jumped back and slammed the door.

“Whoa,” Gryffindor said. “What was that?”

Slytherin paused as he mentally flipped through several theories. “You need to tell me if you can see anything through here. I think I might be hallucinating.”

“You think the broken spell you cleared up is making you see things or something?”

“Maybe. Or maybe there’s a boggart or something. I don’t know, just… check in there.”

Gryffindor shrugged and pulled the door open. “What am I looking for? There’s a bench, and a bunch of windows, and a rug… I don’t see anything scary.”

Slytherin peered around the door. “It’s not there.”

“Okay,” Gryffindor said. “Let’s be genre savvy about this. If we’re in a horror movie scenario, rule number one is… well, we’ve already broken it by splitting up the group. Rule number two is that we don’t go off alone. And rule number three—”

“What are you talking about?” asked a female voice from behind them.

To his credit, Gryffindor spun around immediately without even yelling. But he did stumble backwards when he saw the ghost, because the pale, transparent face in front of him… was Ravenclaw’s. 

  


When they made it back to the staff room, Hufflepuff looked up from what she was doing—currently, bottling up her fresh batch of Wit—and asked: “How long do you two think you’ve been gone?”

“Uh oh,” Gryffindor muttered under his breath.

Hufflepuff rolled her eyes. “No, I’m not yelling at you. It was a question. How long do you think you’ve been gone? What did you do?”

“See,” Gryffindor said, “usually these are questions people ask me when they’re mad at me.”

“Seems like it was about an hour?” Slytherin guessed. “We found the Great Hall. It’s covered in dust and there’s an Erkling problem.”

Hufflepuff winced.

“Yeah,” Gryffindor said, “exactly. So we didn’t go hunting after it, and we went looking for a broom cupboard so we could clean the place up.”

Hufflepuff’s eyes narrowed.

“Gryf… stop,” Slytherin said, putting a hand to his forehead. “You’re making this sound like a lie. We actually did go looking for cleaning supplies. But we found one of the castle ghosts instead.”

“Which one?” Ravenclaw asked, stepping out of the girls’ tent.

“Helena Ravenclaw. Your great-great-great… et cetera grandmother. I think she wants to talk to you.”

“She scared the crap out of us,” Gryffindor said. “She really does look like you.”

Rowena sighed the sigh of someone hearing this information for the thousandth time. “I know.”

“She’s been watching us all day,” Gryffindor said. “But she’s basically invisible and really hard to hear in the daylight. She’s probably what Helga was worried about earlier.”

Slytherin pulled out one of the chairs that they’d pushed against the wall earlier. “It’s strange, but she seemed to think there was something going on around here involving—”

“Time?” Ravenclaw suggested.

Slytherin nodded.

“I think the broken spells have affected it,” Ravenclaw said. “I think that when we destroy one, time has to sync up between the places nearby, so that it flows at the same rate. That’s disorienting.”

“But I don’t think that’s the only thing we’re dealing with,” Hufflepuff said. “Why would chocolate matter if it’s just about time? I think there’s some kind of dark magic wrapped up in this.”

Slytherin shrugged. “It seems sensible to assume so until we find a reason not to.”

“It seems sensible to eat and then go to sleep,” Ravenclaw said, yawning. 

“Excellent idea,” Hufflepuff said, with a flash of her usual cheery smile.

So they did.


	3. The hunt for supplies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day two, part one. Rowena's wand gets salty with her. The founders' first meal in the Great Hall. A hunt for spell ingredients, and the possibility of loyal guardian slime monsters. A discussion of castle decor. In deep Hogwarts, *everyone* can hear the *castle* scream.

“Rowena?”

Ravenclaw turned over in her sleep and kept muttering.

“Rowena, get up… breakfast is on its way.”

Ravenclaw drifted into consciousness just enough to be vaguely unhappy about it.

“No, you can’t go back to sleep! I have to turn the bacon over in a minute and I can’t be standing here shaking you.”

“Bacon?” Ravenclaw blinked. She tried to sit up. It took several attempts.

Hufflepuff sighed. “Finally. You were sleeptalking in Latin again. You know your wand gets restless when you do that.”

“Oh,” Ravenclaw said, rubbing her eyes. “Uh, what… happened?”

“It shot off sparks,” Hufflepuff said. “The carpet was smoldering when I came in. I had to stamp it out.”

“Ah… it does that when it gets too bored.” Ravenclaw picked up her wand, which flared with light in response. “Ow,  nox, ” Ravenclaw said, squinting until the light died down—her eyes hadn’t even adjusted to being awake yet. “Okay, okay, I’m getting up.”

“Sassy,” Hufflepuff said, eyebrows raised. “I think mine is missing the alarm clock feature.” Then, in her skirt pocket, Hufflepuff’s wand lit up too. “I wasn’t criticizing you, sweetie,” she told it. “Let’s go back to making breakfast.” Helga reached for her pocket, and her wand leapt the last few inches into her hand on its own. She left the tent.

Ravenclaw got up. She went to the pile of clothes she’d thrown on the floor last night, picked them up, and tried to charm them a bit cleaner. But it didn’t work well. She wasn’t really awake, and her wand seemed not in the mood to do her any favors either.

“Look,” she told it. “I know I spent most of yesterday evening not using you, and then I slept in, and you’re annoyed with me. But we’re going to try that new spell later today, and I know you’ll like that. Before we can get there, though, I have to get  dressed! ”

Even with this admonishment, it wasn’t until Ravenclaw suggested that maybe Helga’s wand would be happier to perform the task that her own gave in and did her laundry. She sighed. Sometimes its personality was a little too close to hers.

Finally, she got dressed in clean-ish clothes, then brushed her hair (this also took a while—she hadn’t done a good job of untangling it last night) and hastily braided it into a long plait to try to hide the fact that it hadn’t been washed. Hopefully this would keep it under control if she had to do any flying today. She cleaned her teeth in the tent’s sink, washed yesterday’s crusty makeup off her face, then quickly redid her eyeliner—it ended up a bit thicker on one side than the other, but not enough to be noticeable. Good enough for now.

She left the tent. Slytherin was already up and sitting at one of the tables, where he was focused on writing in his journal. He was dressed but didn’t seem really awake yet either. Hufflepuff, of course, had already been up for a few hours, and was fully awake and perfectly put together, with her hair in a neat bun. She was presiding over a pan of expertly cooked crispy bacon, tipping the pan with her wand so that the grease stayed behind when she pulled the bacon out with her tongs.

She was starting to arrange a second batch in the pan when Gryffindor came stumbling out of the boys’ tent, still in the baggy T-shirt and cotton shorts he’d slept in, rubbing his eyes. “Morning, Puffskein. What smells so good?”

Hufflepuff stuck her tongue out in response to the nickname. “Nothing for you until you get dressed.” She’d adopted this strategy while they were traveling together, to prod her friends into getting ready quickly in the morning.

Ravenclaw started making toast, to help out. Slytherin finished whatever he’d been writing about. Gryffindor emerged from his tent a second time, then had to go back in when Slytherin pointed out that he’d buttoned his flannel shirt one off from the buttonholes. When he came out again, beaming, he and Slytherin nodded at each other and quickly left together.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Ravenclaw asked as Hufflepuff moved the last of the bacon onto a plate.

“I’m not sure I want to know.”

“You don’t think we should follow them, then,” Ravenclaw said. “To make sure they’re not getting into trouble?”

They shared a look.

“Nah,” Ravenclaw said. “It’ll be a learning exercise. Provided they don’t die.”

“They’ll be fine if they don’t run into anything big, like the acromantulas.” She cracked an egg into the hot bacon fat, where it popped and sizzled loudly. “And Nefertiti’s with them, so they won’t be a problem unless Gryf goes off on his own.”

“I didn’t see her,” Ravenclaw said. “Though, it does seem unlikely that Sal would ever leave without her.”

“She was riding in the hood of his cloak. Just be careful not to bump into him from behind.”

Ten minutes later, just as Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were assembling plates, the boys burst back into the room.

“No picnicking for us today!” Gryffindor announced. “We have a real table now—we’ve cleaned out the Great Hall!”

“In fifteen minutes?” Ravenclaw asked.

He shrugged. “It was at least half an hour for us. Plus, we did end up finding the broom closet last night. Your great-great-great-whatever grandma told us where it was.”

“It’s not perfectly clean,” Slytherin said. “The walls still need a good scrub. But it’s good enough for now. We thought, since you two were doing all the cooking…”

“That’s such a good idea,” Hufflepuff said, beaming at him. “Thank you! Here, take this.” She gave him a full plate and a handful of silverware.

“No sign of the visitors from last night, then?” Ravenclaw asked as they all carried their food down the corridor to the Great Hall.

“Didn’t see any,” Gryffindor said. “They’re kinda nocturnal, though. I don’t think we’ve scared them off yet, if that’s what you’re asking.” He pushed one of the doors to the Great Hall open with his foot.

“Wow!” Hufflepuff said. “It’s huge!”

“The enchantments here held up well,” Ravenclaw said, looking at the ceiling. 

Gryffindor set his plate down on the nearest of the three main tables, and almost leapt into the bench beside it. He patted the seat next to him enthusiastically, inviting them to join.

“So these are the old House tables,” Ravenclaw said, sitting down across from him. “It’s weird. To think of the way life in this castle must have been, I mean, and the way we’re here now. We’re basically moving into a historical site.”

Slytherin shrugged. “Finders keepers.” He dug into his eggs.

“I don’t think history will mind,” Hufflepuff said. “I think the people who used to live here would want it to keep being a school. We’ll try to preserve what’s practical to keep.”

“Yeah,” Gryffindor said, waving a strip of bacon around. “Teaching was their whole thing. That’s the important bit. You gotta be flexible on the details.”

“Well…” Ravenclaw said, “the place certainly isn’t doing any good as it stands.”

“So what’s the game plan?” Gryffindor asked. “What are we doing today?”

Ravenclaw explained about the spell she’d found, which might help them mark the breakpoints for the shattered spells they needed to clean up. “We’ll need to find some Billywig stings and then each learn the spell. I know there are other spells that can make marks in the air, but none of the ones I’m thinking of last long enough, or are precise enough, for what we need.”

“We should be able to find some in the potions room,” Slytherin said. “It’s in the dungeons. I have a map somewhere in my notes.”

“Oh, and Helena Ravenclaw said we might run into more ghosts as we’re clearing up the spells. So don’t be surprised if we see any.”

“I wonder about the castle’s other occupants,” Ravenclaw said. “Weren’t there house elves? And what about the paintings? I’ve been seeing a lot of empty frames, but no occupants—did they evacuate somewhere?”

“House elves?” Hufflepuff asked.

“Uh, I don’t think you’ve met one before,” Ravenclaw said. “They tend to show up in fancy houses and castles where wizards are living. They like taking care of us for some reason. This place used to have a whole bunch of them, but they haven’t been seen since the war.”

“Oh. I hope they’re okay.”

“They probably just left and found new homes,” Ravenclaw said. “They’re very loyal, but I don’t think they’d stay somewhere that’s abandoned for very long. They like to work too much. If they were still here, this place would be a whole lot cleaner, so I think they’ve moved on.”

Hufflepuff looked relieved, but Slytherin frowned. “That’s shameful. Not the house elves moving out, but that the wizards here abandoned them to fend for themselves.”

Gryffindor blinked. “Whoa, Sal. I didn’t know you had strong opinions about house elves.”

“It’s not about house elves specifically. When someone or something is loyal to you, and you accept that loyalty—you don’t turn around and betray them. You take care of them.” He sighed. “House elves don’t like moving around. They stay in the same place for generations. Their families have traditions, just like wizards do, that connect them to their past and their people, and having to switch households upsets that. I suppose it does make things worse that it’s them.”

“We don’t know if the castle’s occupants had a choice,” Ravenclaw said. “This place took us years to find, remember? Anyway, maybe they moved out to go live with the wizards who used to stay here.”

“Maybe. But the fact that we don’t know, when so much was written down about the war… that itself seems uncaring. Someone should have been keeping track of them.”

“So what kind of path do we need to take to get to the potions room?” Hufflepuff asked.

“Ah, right,” Slytherin said, relaxing a little. “Well, the castle has a lot of staircases into the underground levels. The first level down is actually the kitchens, which we saw yesterday, and it’s technically only half underground since the rock the castle is built into isn’t perfectly level—it’s shorter in the back than in front. There’s supposed to be some kind of hidden passage into the grounds from that general back area, so if we can’t make the descent through the inside of the castle, we can try to find that from the outside. It comes out around the greenhouses, though, so that might be tricky to navigate.”

“Let’s save that for Plan B, then,” Ravenclaw said. “You think we can just use the staircase we used yesterday?”

“Probably, at least to get down to the kitchens again. I’ve noticed the staircases don’t seem to move as often as my reading suggested. From there, it goes down a few more levels. The problem is that the potions room is off at one end of the castle’s footprint, and our staircase is about in the middle. The underground floors are just as large as any above.”

“And—how many underground floors are there?” Ravenclaw asked, frowning.

“Counting the kitchen level?” Slytherin said. “Three is my best guess. These maps can be very hard to read, and some of my sources suggest the existence of even deeper structures. The potions room is on the third basement level, in theory the deepest one.”

“What were they  keeping  down there?” Ravenclaw asked. “Surely those aren’t all classrooms.”

“There are some classrooms,” Slytherin said, paging through his journal. “Especially on the second floor down, below the kitchens, and there are more on the third floor with the potions labs. But a lot of the space is unmarked. Some of it says ‘storage,’ and that makes sense—the Dumbledores were well known as artificers. They might be full of centuries’ worth of magical objects and experiments. Or they might just be records about the school and so on, I don’t know.”

“Maybe there are secret magical artifact labs down there,” Gryffindor said, heaping more jam onto his toast. “And they’re gonna be filled with loyal guardian slime monsters that’ll attack us as soon as we try to go in.”

“You’re joking, but that’s not out of the question,” Slytherin said.

“Maybe they’ll be nice loyal guardian slime monsters,” Hufflepuff said, “and they’ll help us find the Billywig stings so we can restore the castle.”

“Wanna make a bet?” Gryffindor asked.

“No!”

“Didn’t think so.”

  


Ravenclaw went down the spiral stairs first, trailblazing through the spiderwebs—literally. A tail of fire whipped out of the end of her wand, which she waved around ahead of her, setting the dust and cobwebs ablaze.

“That mark we saw on the wall, back at the kitchen level,” Hufflepuff said. “The straight line, up and down. Was that supposed to be there?”

“Maybe,” Slytherin said. “It could be the symbol for the Wands. The school Houses were based on the three Deathly Hallows.”

“Huh. Did the Wands students like cooking or something?”

“I don’t think that’s it. It seems more likely that the three dungeon levels were marked by the symbols rather than numbers. Wand level, cloak level, stone level.”

“I guess in a castle with seven floors above and three below,” Ravenclaw said, “it’s easier than saying ‘the third basement down’ all the time.”

“Right.”

“I still think it’s weird that the Hallows stuff is everywhere,” Gryffindor said, his hand on his wand. “It kinda creeps me out, if I’m being honest.”

“We should replace it with something else,” Hufflepuff said.

“Like what?” Ravenclaw asked.

“Oh, some other kind of symbol. Like, flowers, or animals or something.”

“Animals is a cool idea,” Gryffindor said. “This is a castle. We could totally put up escutcheons and stuff.”

“Only you and Sal belong to families with an actual coat of arms,” Ravenclaw reminded him.

“Well, make one up, then!”

“I don’t think that’s how heraldry works—”

“Heraldry schmeraldry! We’re talking castle decor. Pick something cool.”

“Rowena, you should put an eagle on yours,” Slytherin said. “And then don’t tell any of the historians you’re an animagus, so they spend forever trying to figure out why it’s not a raven before someone figures out that they need to check the Ministry’s registry.”

Ravenclaw opened her mouth to say something sarcastic, but then shut it. She seemed to be considering the idea. “You know, I’ve had to write enough history papers that at this point, being that much of a pain in the ass is kind of tempting.”

“It’d be like leaving an Easter egg for future generations,” Hufflepuff said encouragingly.

Ravenclaw rolled her eyes. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. You’re talking about history books recording stuff we haven’t done, and decorations for a castle we haven’t even rebuilt yet.”

“Well, let’s go rebuild it,” Hufflepuff said, and stepped out onto the landing. There was a circle carved into the wall. “Stone level. We’re here.”

Ravenclaw waved her wand at the lamps on the walls, but they didn’t light. Broken. “Damn. Lumos.”

Guided by their wand-light, they picked their way through the corridors. This area looked less battle-damaged than other parts of the castle, but there were loose floor tiles and the air felt damp and cold.

“Ugh,” Ravenclaw said, as her next steps made splashing sounds. “There’s water on the floor.”

“Figured,” Slytherin muttered. He waved his wand irritably, vanishing the water ahead of them, then took the lead as he continued the spell.

They proceeded down the hallway for a while.

“So, Helga,” Gryffindor said with a mischievous grin, “if you had to come up with a coat of arms for yourself, what would be on it? A puffskein?”

“I don’t know what I’d put on it,” she said, choosing not to acknowledge the puffskein joke. “Maybe a bear? Or a honeybee?”

“Interesting choices,” Slytherin said.

“Or maybe, like, one of those animals that doesn’t get a whole lot of appreciation,” Hufflepuff continued. “Maybe a beaver? They’re pretty cute. Or a badger. Or a capybara. Or…”

“A goose?” Gryffindor suggested.

“No, they’re mean!”

“A giraffe?”

“That would just look silly.”

“A frog?”

“Why a frog?!”

They went on like this for a while until Slytherin interrupted. “I don’t really know how long this dungeon corridor is supposed to be, but it seems like we should have gotten somewhere by now.”

“Maybe we’re in some kind of tunnel?” Gryffindor suggested.

“I don’t think so. Look at the water.” It seemed to be flowing away from them somehow. “It should be flowing toward us, the way I’ve been vanishing the edge of the pool.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“Something weird is going on. I think we’re being tricked. Rowena, can I borrow your pencil?”

Ravenclaw removed her hat. The inside had an elastic band sewn into it so that writing utensils could be stored in the point. She pulled out a red pencil and handed it over.

“Right,” Slytherin said. He made an X on one of the stones in the wall, then handed the pencil back. “Let’s keep going.”

A minute later, they saw the X again. Slytherin stopped in front of it. He and Gryffindor shared a look.

“Both of us?” Gryffindor asked.

“Yes. Just in case.”

“Finite incantatem!” The spell made a rumbling sound which echoed down the hallway into silence.

“What was that?” Ravenclaw asked, as the water started flowing normally again and they left the X behind.

“Infinite hallway enchantment,” Slytherin said. “Some kind of extension charm, probably. I think we’re running into protections that were active during the battle. This one didn’t break.”

Gryffindor grinned. “Booby traps! Awesome!”

Fifteen steps later, they set off the caterwauling charm.

It was so loud that none of them could hear the others yelling  finite incantatem; they could barely hear their own voices, if it came to that.

Ravenclaw stopped panicking first. She tapped everyone on the shoulder, made a wand movement in the air to show which spell she meant, and held up three fingers—two—one.

“Silencio!”

The caterwauling faded into a pitiful whine, then stopped. Everyone took a breather while the ringing in their ears subsided.

“I didn’t think that spell was strong enough to shut down a caterwaul,” Slytherin said. 

“It is with four people.”

“What’s at the end of all this that was so important to protect?” Hufflepuff asked.

Gryffindor tucked his wand back into his belt. “I think we’re about to find out.”


End file.
